Makover in SL

I got hooked up with L$500 from Blake Stringfellow the other day on Second Life and got the whole makeover.

Did a Search on ‘urban clothing and this place “URBAN Megastore !!” came up at the top of my list.

Prim Building
I did this post a little late so I’m already ahead on my prim building skills an have a pavilion to show you.

Second Life chilling

In Second Life now and in the ITWorld Classroom. Makes for a great meeting place for virtual meetings.

Look Ma, I'm really in class!

Cisco Virtual Campus
I took a little visit to the Cisco Virtual Campus in Second Life today and was blown away. Being the world’s largest Manufacturer of networking hardware I didn’t expect less. I took Cisco Networking Academy in high school which really gave me an appreciation for those in infrastructure field in knowing how to connect all these systems that we work with day to day basis. The Virtual Campus has samples of interactivity for the community, customers, and employees. As part of their Carbon initiative to save on travel by cutting down on travel, virtual meetings along with many other functions can be held on Campus. As a NetAcad student, I think I would have liked to have had this when taking the class as now tutorials and instuctors can meet here as well.

Me in the Cisco Virtual Campus

Cisco’s got a huge Second life plot with a lot of buildings and landmarks. And its not only one community either as there’s a whole another one for customers and product info. Anyway, thats it for this post… Until next time.

Google Products: Gmail, Maps

Almost from its inception and me first hearing about it in 8th grade, I was a fan of Google’s and knew they were gonna do big things. There search engine came from out of nowhere and did what no other competiters could do better, keep searching simple. I was using yahoo at the time for all my research and i-net query’s, but couldn’t turn down the better results it offered. Today I want to share my knowledge of some of it’s products that I came to use more often and show how google’s success has been centered around their ability to better enable user search for information no matter what type.

Gmail

In 2004 Google releases what seems to be its own email service Gmail in order to compete with competitors mainly in sheer storage space 1Gb at the time per mailbox. It was in beta at the time but the only way to get in was to be sent an invite from someone already within it which was limited. Of course I was trying desperately to get away from yahoo at the time gmail just seemed like the place to be. With all the space available in every mailbox, the idea was to “never have to delete emails again!” Instead you could search your mail like you did your web searches. This along with conversational styled grouping ‘Re:’ and ‘Fwd:’ emails with the same subject was all it needed to stir up mobs of geeks trying to find invite links all over the internet.

I didn’t get my code for some months but eventually lucked out around September 04 with my current email address. Things like better indexing of messages, clean interface, and suggest function for contacts had sealed the deal for me. It was the envy of all other competitors (hotmail, lycos, yahoo, and more) and had people flocking all over.

Google Maps

When I first opened Google Maps, Google’s map product, I had no clue where the address went. All I saw was a normal search box with a button that said “Search Maps”. It turned out that this simple search foundation Google is so known for is still present here. So I typed in an address normally and it zoomed into the location on the map with pins along the side showing possible results in the area. The map was click n’ drag-able which was something new. Scrolling the mouse wheel zoomed in and out. This was soon widely accepted over its competitors (yahoo, mapquest) and could be integrated into sites and web pages easily through its API.

Dove Beauty Campaign

After viewing the dove commercials and their Campaign for Real Beauty website I think that they are definitely making a positive image in the beauty industry. With Unilever throwing its support behind the Paradise Forests of South East Asia to prevent them from being destroyed and trying to make huge controversial statements in the world of consumer beauty products, they definitely have an image that I’d support myself. To speak of things like ‘Real Beauty’ and Pro-age are comanding statements which can only benefit them as they are basically ‘opening’ the industry’s eyes on these issues and addressing them head on instead of avoiding them as their competitors might do.

Yelp Review: Frenchy’s Chicken

Just wanted to point to my Yelp review of Frenchy’s Chicken off of Scott street near Wheeler (right next to campus). I’ve been here several times since moving here and can vouch for the chicken. Yelp Review

Domain Name Shopping!!!

Looking for domain names can be difficult these days especially with all the good ones taken up already and premium price tags placed on them. For my domain name search I chose to use godaddy.com which I’ve use in the past for my student org site for National Association of Black Accountants. Now using my own name Michael Hill is obviously very common forcing one to come up with a more unique offering (i.e. MIKEHILLSITE.COM or MIKEHILLONLINE.COM…).

Sorry Guys…Awake now!

Sorry for the long absence. Back in action now.

Let’s take a Picnik!

Okay maybe not really, but a Picnik on Facebook is a whole other story. Picnik is a popular online tool which allows you to edit and crop photos on-the-go w/o all the hassles of an installed application. With this very articulate tool, people are able to spice up normal photos in their albums with fun effect adding to the excitement of viewing photos.

As a business value, people obviously like scrapbooking and making little edits to photos that they’ll cherish for some time. Puting a watermark on the photo lets this app pull in premium subscribers that will want to edit personal and friends photos for hours on end.

Digg Labs: Stack

In investigating the digg labs tools, one that took my attention was the stack application. In it the digger is able to see a digg-by-digg play of diggs currently taking place on the top 100 stories. This is a good way for people to somewhat gauge how quickly word may spread on a particular story or relative popularity in total.
In a business sense this may be good for article writers that want to see where their story stack up to similar stories at any given moment. This would enable real-time popularity gauging for, lets say, advertising purposes. No matter how this tool is looked at, its definitely a useful visual representation of diggs across the site (also fun to look at rain ). Until the next post…

Tweet me!

Watch me Twitter!

Hey guys! I’m up on twitter so hit me up with a tweet when you get a chance.  I have all incoming tweets coming to my cell so expect a quick an sarcastic reply. I’ve added Dr. Ives and Hesam (should be interesting) along with the rest of the Enterprise 2.0 class so we can all procrastinate together and be even more connected. Until next time…